The Golden Notebook (26 page)

children upstairs. Paul saw her standing there, fingering the magazines and examining the room, and remarked, with his familiar grim humour: 'This is her house, Ella. To do as she likes in. It's surely the least I can do.' 'Yes, it's the least.' 'Yes. It must be upstairs,' and Paul left the kitchen and started upstairs, saying over his shoulder: 'Well come up, then?' She wondered: Is he showing me his home in order to demonstrate something? Because he wants to tell me something? He doesn't know I hate being here? But she again obediently followed him up and into the bedroom. This room was different again, and had evidently been exactly as it was now for a long time. It had twin beds, on either side of a neat little table on which was a big framed photograph of Paul. The colours were green and orange and black, with a great many restless zebra stripes-the 'jazz' era in furnishing, twenty-five years after its birth. Paul had found his magazine, which was on the bedside table, and was ready to leave again. Ella said: 'One of these days I'll get a letter, handed on by Dr West. "Dear Dr Allsop. Please tell me what to do. Lately I can't sleep at nights. I've been drinking hot milk before going to bed and trying to keep a relaxed mind, but it doesn't help. Please advise me, Muriel Tanner. P. S. I forgot to mention, my husband wakes me early, about six o'clock, coming in from working late at the hospital. Sometimes he doesn't come home all week. I get low in my spirits. This has been going on five years now." ' Paul listened, with a sober, sad face. 'It's been no secret to you,' he said at last, 'that I'm not exactly proud of myself as a husband.' 'For God's sake, why don't you put an end to it then?' 'What!' he exclaimed, half-laughing already, and back in his role as a rake, 'abandon the poor woman with two children?' 'She might get herself a man who cared for her. Don't tell me you'd mind if she did. Surely you don't like the idea of her living like this?' He answered seriously: 'I've told you, she's a very simple woman. You always assume other people are like you. Well they aren't. She likes watching television and reading Women at Home and sticking bits of wallpaper on the walls. And she's a good mother.' 'And she doesn't mind not having a man?' 'For all I know she has, I've never enquired,' he said, laughing again. 'Oh well, I don't know!' said Ella, completely dispirited, following him downstairs again. She left the discordant little house thankfully, as if escaping from a trap; and she looked down the street and thought that probably they were all like this, all in fragments, not one of them a whole, reflecting a whole life, a whole human being; or, for that matter, a whole family. 'What you don't like,' said Paul, as they drove off, 'is that Muriel might be happy living like this.' 'How can she be?' 'I asked her some time ago, if she'd like to leave me. She could go back to her parents, if she wanted. She said no. Besides, she'd be lost without me.' 'Good Lord!' said Ella, disgusted and afraid. 'It's true, I'm a sort of father, she depends on me completely.' 'But she never sees you.' 'I'm nothing if not efficient,' he said, shortly. 'When I go home I deal with everything. The gas heaters, and the electricity bill and where to buy a cheap carpet, and what to do about the children's school. Everything.' When she did not reply he insisted: 'I've told you before, you're a snob, Ella. You can't stand the fact that maybe it's how she likes to live.' 'No, I can't. And I don't believe it. No woman in the world wants to live without love.' 'You're such a perfectionist. You're an absolutist. You measure everything against some kind of ideal that exists in your head, and if it doesn't come up to your beautiful notions then you condemn it out of hand. Or you pretend to yourself that it's beautiful even when it isn't.' Ella thought: He means us; and Paul was already going on: 'For instance-Muriel might just as well say of you: Why on earth does she put up with being my husband's mistress, what security is there in that? And it's not respectable.' 'Oh, security!' 'Oh, quite so. You say, scornfully, Oh, security! Oh, respectability! But Muriel wouldn't. They're very important to her. They're very important to most people.' It occurred to Ella that he sounded angry and even hurt. It occurred to her that he identified himself with his wife (and yet all his tastes, when he was with her, Ella, were different) and that security and respectability were important to him also. She was silent, thinking: If he really likes living like that, or at least, needs it, it would explain why he's always dissatisfied with me. The other side of the sober respectable little wife is the smart, gay, sexy mistress. Perhaps he really would like it if I were unfaithful to him and wore tarty clothes. Well I won't. This is what I am, and if he doesn't like it he can lump it. Later that evening he said, laughing, but aggressive: 'It would do you good, Ella, to be like other women.' 'What do you mean?' 'Waiting at home, the wife, trying to keep your man against the other woman. Instead of having a lover at your feet.' 'Oh, is that where you are?' she said, ironically. 'But why do you see marriage as a kind of fight? I don't see it as a battle.' 'You don't!' he said, ironical in his turn. And after a pause: 'You've just written a novel about suicide.' 'What's that got to do with it?' 'All that intelligent insight...' He checked himself and sat looking at her, rueful and critical and-Ella thought, condemning. They were up in her little room, high under the roof, the child sleeping next door, the remains of the meal she had cooked on the low table between them, as they had been a thousand times. He turned a glass of wine between his fingers and said, in pain: 'I don't know how I'd have got through the last months without you.' 'What's happened particularly the last few months?' 'Nothing. That's the point. It all goes on and on. Well, in Nigeria I won't be patching up old sores, wounds on a mangy lion. That's my work, putting ointment on the wounds of an old animal that hasn't the vitality any more to heal itself. At least in Africa I'll be working for something new and growing.' He went to Nigeria with unexpected suddenness. Unexpected, at least, to Ella. They were still talking of it as something that would happen in the future when he came in to say he was leaving next day. The plans for how she would join him were necessarily vague, until he knew the conditions there. She saw him off at the airport, as if she would be meeting him again in a few weeks. Yet after he had kissed her good-bye, he turned with a small bitter nod and a twisted smile, a sort of a painful grimace of his whole body, and suddenly Ella felt the tears running down her face, and she was cold with loss in every nerve. She was unable to stop crying, to prevent the cold that made her shiver, steadily, for days afterwards. She wrote letters, and made plans, but it was from inside a shadow that slowly deepened over her. He wrote once, saying it was impossible to say definitely yet how she and Michael could come out to join him; and then there was silence. One afternoon she was working with Dr West, over a pile of the usual letters, and he remarked: 'I had a letter from Paul Tanner yesterday.' 'Did you?' Dr West, so far as she knew, did not know of her relationship with Paul. 'Sounds as if he's liking it out there, so I suppose he'll take his family out.' He carefully clipped some letters together for his own pile, and went on: 'Just as well he went, I gather. He told me just before he left he'd got himself involved with a pretty flighty piece. Heavily involved, it sounded. She didn't sound much good to me.' Ella made herself breathe normally, examined Dr West, and decided that this was just casual gossip about a mutual friend, and not meant to wound her. She took up a letter he had handed her, which began: 'Dear Dr Allsop, I'm writing to you about my little boy who is walking in his sleep...' and said: 'Dr West, surely this is your province?' For this amiable battle had continued, unchanged, for all the years they had worked together. 'No, Ella, it is not. If a child walks in its sleep, it's no good my prescribing medicines, and you'd be the first to blame me if I did. Tell the woman to go to the clinic and suggest tactfully that it's her fault and not the child's. Well, I don't have to tell you what to say.' He took up another letter and said: 'I told Tanner to stay out of England as long as possible. These things are not always easy to break off. The young lady was pestering him to marry her. A not-so-young lady, actually. That was the trouble. I suppose she'd got tired of a gay life and wanted to settle down.' Ella made herself not-think about this conversation until she had completed the division of letters with Dr West. Well, I've been naive, she decided at last. I suppost he was having an affair with Stephanie at the hospital. At least, he never mentioned anyone but Stephanie, he was always talking about her. But he never spoke of her in that tone, 'flighty piece.' No that's the Wests' language, they use idiotic phrases like flighty piece and getting tired of a gay life. How extraordinarily common these respectable middle-class people are. Meanwhile she was deeply depressed; and the shadow that she had been fighting off since Paul had left engulfed her completely. She thought about Paul's wife: she must have felt like this, this complete rejection, when Paul lost interest in her. Well at least she, Ella, had had the advantage of being too stupid to realise that Paul was having an affair with Stephanie. But perhaps Muriel had also chosen to be stupid- had chosen to believe that Paul spent so many nights at the hospital? Ella had a dream which was unpleasant and disturbing. She was in the ugly little house, with its little rooms that were all different from each other. She was Paul's wife, and only by an effort of will could she prevent the house disintegrating, and flying off in all directions because of the conflict between the rooms. She decided she must furnish the whole house again, in one style, hers. But as soon as she hung new curtains or painted a room out, Muriel's room was re-created. Ella was like a ghost in this house and she realised it would hold together, somehow, as long as Muriel's spirit was in it and it was holding together precisely because every room belonged to a different epoch, a different spirit. And Ella saw herself standing in the kitchen, her hand on the pile of Women at Home; she was a 'sexy piece' (she could hear the words being said, by Dr West) with a tight coloured skirt and a very tight jersey and her hair was cut fashionably. And Ella realised that Muriel was not there after all, she had gone to Nigeria to join Paul, and Ella was waiting in the house until Paul came back. When Ella woke after this dream she was crying. It occurred to her, for the first time, that the woman from whom Paul had had to separate himself, for whom he had gone to Nigeria, because he had at all costs to separate himself from her, was herself. She was the flighty piece. She understood alsp that Dr West had spoken deliberately, perhaps because of some phrase in Paul's letter to him; it was a warning from the respectable world of Dr West, protecting one of its members, to Ella. Strangely enough, the shock was enough, for a while at least, to break the power of the depressive mood that had held her for months now in its dark grip. She swung over into a mood of bitter, angry defiance. She told Julia that Paul had 'ditched her,' and that she had been a fool not to see it before (and Julia's silence said she agreed with Ella completely). She said that she had no intention of sitting around and crying about it. Without knowing that she had been unconsciously planning to do this, she went out and bought herself new clothes. They were not the 'sexy' clothes Paul had urged on her, but they were different from any clothes she had worn before, and fitted her new personality, which was rather hard, casual, and indifferent-or at least, so she believed. And she had her hair cut, so it was in a soft provocative shape around her small pointed face. And she decided to leave Julia's house. It was the house she had lived in with Paul, and she could no longer stand it. Very cool, clear and efficient, she found herself a new flat and settled into it. It was a large flat, much too large for the child and herself. It was only after she had settled in it she understood the extra space was for a man. For Paul, in fact, and she was still living as if he were returning to her. Then she heard, quite by chance, that Paul had returned to England for leave and had been here already for two weeks. On the night of the day she heard this news, she found herself dressed and made-up, her hair carefully done, standing at the window looking down into the street, and waiting for him. She waited until long after midnight, thinking: His work at the hospital might easily keep him as late as this, I mustn't go to bed too early, because he'll see the lights are out, and not come up, for fear of waking me. She stood there, night after night. She could see herself standing there, and said to herself: This is madness. This is being mad. Being mad is not being able to stop yourself doing something that you know to be irrational. Because you know Paul will not come. And yet she continued to dress herself and to stand for hours at the window, waiting, every night. And, standing there and looking at herself, she could see how this madness was linked with the madness that had prevented her from seeing how the affair would inevitably end, the naivety that had made her so happy. Yes, the stupid faith and naivety and trust had led, quite logically, into her standing at the window waiting for a man whom she knew, quite well, would never come to her again. After some weeks, she heard from Dr West, apparently casually, though with a hidden triumphant malice, that Paul had gone back to Nigeria again. 'His wife wouldn't go with him,' said Dr West. 'She doesn't want to uproot herself. Perfectly happy where she is, apparently.' The trouble with this story is that it is written in terms of analysis of the laws of dissolution of the relationship between Paul and Ella. I don't see any other way to write it. As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years and has been as close as a marriage, is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all. Supposing I were to write it like this: two full days, in every detail, one at the beginning of the affair, and one towards the end? No, because I would still be instinctively isolating and emphasising the factors that destroyed